Always a delight it is when I get to have a good meal at one of my favorite night time hawker centers in the country.
Blk 85 Fengshan, or Fengshan, as it's more commonly known, is one of the most popular hawker centers in the East for afternoon lunches, meals and late night suppers.
I've not been there very much for afternoon meals.
Nor for supper either.
Dinner, I guess, is more my thing.
It is the usual case that we have bowls of pork and century egg porridge whenever we come here.
But sometimes, like today, we try for other foods.
Having vacillated between porridge, Ah Balling tangyuan in peanut soup, and ngoh hiang, we decided to forgo all of them and try out one of the zichar stalls instead.
I don't know which stall it is my friend went to, but our order came back as a whole plate of salted egg chicken.
And it was good.
Was it oily?
Yes, of course- you could see the layer of oil on the lettuce shimmering brightly under the white glare of the lights above.
But it didn't matter.
Salted egg chicken is one of those dishes that must have the shiok factor.
Otherwise it's a waste of tummy space, money and time.
I'm a little particular when it comes to my zichar dishes, especially ones like these.
Because I've had salted egg dishes where the seasoning is but a mere scatter and there's hardly any satisfaction at all.
But when done well this dish will grant you that balance of crisp and taste combining the best of flavors- salty, rounded (from the egg), and with a faint distinctive taste of sweet.
It's very appetising.
What's more, we didn't just go for the zichar alone.
It's not possible to come to a hawker center like Fengshan and have just one dish.
No, one must support local.
So we ordered more food in the form of satay, and char kuay teow.
The satay was good- grilled so well that you could taste the slightly smoky, slightly burnt feel on each skewer of mutton and beef meat.
One thing I wasn't expecting though was to have the smokiness lingering on the palate but there were all these raw onions on the plate in front of me, and their natural spicy taste easily dispelled it all.
If it was the satay that I liked, it was the kuay teow that I enjoyed.
Maybe because I'd really missed it.
It wasn't a small plate, mind you.
In fact it was rather large, the portion, and fairly well fried, with a hint of sweet, a lot of salty and infused with a lot of wok hei.
One little thing I did wish for, however, was that they'd have more of the kuay teow than the noodle.
(I'm a kuay teow type of girl.)
But there be hawker stalls and hawker centers for you, and they're not places that you- at your whim and fancy- can go up to the stall owner and comment.
Especially since each hawker has their own style, their own technique, even their own gauge of portioning, so it's up to you the diner to go about hunting for your (most) apt one.
Talking about local food oft turns into a fierce discussion when one really gets down to it.
But not for all dishes, and not always all the time either.
Unless you're talking about chicken rice, bak chor mee, prawn noodles, fried Hokkien noodles, ayam goreng, mee rebus and, these days, sometimes, even the (varying) standards of kopi.